Rebels and outcasts, with Mauritanian Beyrouk
Audio 04:31
Beyrouk is Mauritanian.
Author of six novels and a volume of short stories, Beyrouk is today one of the major voices in African literature.
RFI / Yvan Amar
By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow
13 mins
Since the publication in 2006 of his first novel
And the sky forgot to rain
, the Mauritanian writer Beyrouk has established himself as one of the major voices of African literature in the French language.
Author today of six novels and a collection of short stories, he tells story by story the lines of fracture of his society torn between tradition and modernity.
The desert so close, its majestic and disturbing immensity constitute the backdrop of his fiction, carried by a luminous and lyrical writing.
Publicity
The Mauritanian novelist Beyrouk has long believed that Victor Hugo was a Bedouin poet. His father, a schoolteacher and lover of the bard, had made him learn poems from
Contemplations
by heart
. Later, it was while reading
Les Misérables
received as a gift for his 13th birthday that Beyrouk came to writing. The writer remembers: “
My father was a teacher at the colonial school. He taught French: he liked this language very much. He believed that French can be a weapon of freedom. Although a Francophile, he was fiercely anti-colonialist. This is what shaped me. To talk about the first book in French that I read, he gave me a book by Victor Hugo. It was "Les Misérables
"
.
It fascinated me.
I left this book with a passion for the French language and for Victor Hugo in particular?
This passion has not left me.
"
Old oasis town
Mbarek Ould Beyrouk, who signs the only family name “Beyrouk”, was born in 1957, in Atar, capital and gateway to the Adrar region, in northern Mauritania.
Located in the heart of the Saharan desert, this city founded in the 17th century was a former colonial garrison.
The future writer grew up in this old oasis city where his father worked as a teacher in colonial times.
Coming from an old tribe of the Bedouin aristocracy of the Sahara, whose different clans are scattered on both sides of the Sahara, the Beyrouk are the products of a crossbreeding between Moors and Blacks, with an ancestor of Bambara origin .
The heterogeneous Mauritanian society, marked by its balance of power between the feudal past and aspirations for modernity, structured the imagination of young Beyrouk.
It is by drawing from this complex and conflicting universe that he built his fictional work, today rich in six novels and a collection of short stories.
A journalist by training, Beyrouk founded
Mauritanie Demain
in 1988
, the first independent newspaper in his country.
During the six years of its existence, between 1988 and 1994, this newspaper was a reference publication for Mauritanian intellectuals, lovers of freedom and democracy.
When the newspaper ceased to appear, Beyrouk joined the Mauritanian Information Agency.
Should we see a cause and effect relationship between the transition from freelance journalist to the official press and his immersion in writing in the 1990s?
Still, Beyrouk's literary work stands out for its denunciation of the heaviness of Mauritanian society, something that the writer could no longer do as a journalist in the service of the State.
The premises of this critical narrative approach are present from the first news published in confidential periodicals, then with his first novel
Et le ciel a forgot de pleuvoir
, which appeared in 2006, by Éditions Dapper, a French publisher.
The feminine revolt
Beyrouk's first novel tells the story of the female revolt against the patriarchal Mauritanian society.
"
I, Lolla, refuse the fate assigned to me by the Sacred Tablets and the Order written in the Books
", exclaims the heroine of the novel, who refuses to marry the powerful chief of the Oulad Ayatt tribe, as his father decided.
On her wedding night, she goes far from the family camp and joins her lover.
Lolla's revolt has almost feminist overtones, with the young woman claiming her free will and her right to live according to the law of desire: "
I will bathe, alone and free in my own waters,
" she asserts
, and I I will never water more than the wadis of my senses, my tastes, my whimsical appetites
”.
Women are at the heart of Beyrouk's stories. “
Women represent for me
,” the novelist likes to repeat, “
the quintessence of all that is beautiful in our society. It is therefore normal that they occupy leading roles in my novels
”. Beyrouk's heroines embody the possibility of a bright future. They give birth to the future by rebelling against the symbols of traditional authoritarian power, as does the protagonist of
Tambour des larmes
, arguably Beyrouk's most famous novel. Crowned in 2016 by the prestigious Ahmadou-Kourouma prize, this novel depicts Rayhana's frantic race in the footsteps of her child born out of wedlock, confiscated by the moral guardians of her clan.
The adolescent takes revenge by carrying in her flight the sacred drum of her tribe, which, as tradition dictates, must never touch the ground or fall into the hands of women, necessarily soiled and impure.
By seizing this sacred object among the most sacred of the tribe, Rayhana challenges power and shakes its phallocratic foundations.
Released in 2013 and 2018 respectively
, The Emir's Griot
and
I am alone
, are also hymns to femininity.
Inspired by the legends and epics of traditional Sahara literature, the first celebrates the deeds of the beautiful Khadija, a noble warrior who sacrifices herself to wrest the greatness of her family from oblivion and dies under the affront of a brutal emir and unscrupulous.
As for Nezha, heroine of
I am alone
, there is something Antigone in this woman who challenges the jihadists who have seized power in her city located at the gates of the desert.
She hides in her narrow room her lover sought by the bearded fighters who parade in the streets of the city.
A loyal guardian of her past loves, she also fights against the forces of darkness and fanaticism that threaten to engulf her society.
"Land of a million poets"
Particularly captivating are the two new novels that Beyrouk has just published this year, in quick succession.
Paria
, published by Sabine Wespieser and
Le Silence des horizons
by Tunisian editions Elyzad, are echoed by their common theme of quest for origins. It is carried by the incantatory and poetic writing of Beyrouk, which hoists loud and clear the banner of "the
country of a million poets
», Nickname of Mauritania. In doing so, the writer is part of the literary tradition of his region. “In our tradition,” he recalls, “literature means poetry and poetry is the fundamental cultural substrate of the Bedouin. With us, poetry has been idealized. The poet has always been a highly respected person in Bedouin circles. It is therefore not surprising that every Mauritanian dreams of being a poet. I, too, cannot imagine literature without poetry. "
In Beyrouk's lyrical fiction, the poetry is amplified by the proximity of the desert. A source of inspiration, the desert is also a majestic and disturbing presence. “
The desert forces people to look within themselves,
” recalls the author. This is what the protagonist of The
Silence of the Horizons does
in a desperate attempt to make sense of his life and his past. A dark mystery hangs over his origins, over his missing father, hated for having abandoned travelers he had undertaken to guide through the desert. Why ? How? 'Or' What ? Will the hero succeed in finding the key to this mystery that obsesses him? Both investigation and introspection, this novel is also the story of a quest, of a wandering, punctuated by stops in the ancient cities of sands, theater "
impossible dreams
”.
The dream remains impossible forever and happiness inaccessible to the "pariahs" of patriarchal Mauritania who are the real protagonists of the incandescent pages of Beyrouk.
Bibliography:
The silence of horizons
(Elyzad editions, 2021)
Outcast
(Ed. Sabine Wespieser, 2021)
I'm alone
(Elyzad éditions, 2018)
The Drum of Tears
(Elyzad editions, 2015)
The griot of the emir
(Elyzad editions, 2013)
Desert News
(African Presence, 2010)
And the sky forgot to rain
(Dapper, 2006)
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